While it's always good to grow the kind of vegetables which do well in your region, growing the same kind each year will deplete essential nutrients from the soil and in time you'll be getting less and less produce from the same garden. Do any of you actually do some kind of crop rotation in your garden? If you do, how effective is it in getting high-yields from your garden consistently, year after year?
I rotate the crops and fertilize the soil with a good compost before I start my planting season. I try to leave a space unplanted each spring to give the soil time to be replensihed before that space is planted again.
Yes and no. Even when I plant mostly the same plants, I do rotate in the garden where I put them. For example, I may plant a row of tomatoes every year, but one year, they might be at the beginning of the garden, and the next year, they might be at the end or in the middle, etc. I don't know if this is enough rotation, but I figure it can't hurt at least!
We do plant the same stuff each year but change the location. For example, if this year we had cabbage in the left corner of the garden next year it'll be planted in the right corner - and so on. This kind of rotation plus some natural fertilizer keeps the soil healthy and our harvest plentiful. This is all we can do, not many types of vegetables grow in our area so we can't truly rotate the crops.
No not really, I have a rotating planting schedule or so I would call it. I tend to plan out what crops are best to plant on an annual basis but it also depends on the turn out of my previous plantings. If it's not too good then I might have to switch to different crop.
We have a small field and we rotate crops every year! We use about 1/3 of the property that was lent to us for our crops, so we switch the field we plant on every year, meaning that the field can rest for 2 years before we plant on it again. We usually plant the save vegetables every year, but sometimes switch it up. We grow tomatoes (but tomato blight killed every single plant), potatoes, beans, chard, squashes, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, chilies, carrots, onions, and some other vegetables. Crop rotation definitely helps, but our yield varies from year to year depending on the weather conditions. This year's summer is rainy, so we have a lot of cucumbers and squashes, but no tomatoes. Potatoes will also be good this year. Last year, we barely had any cucumbers because of a severe drought. It really depends.
Some of the same, some different. This year we have Corn, Tomatoes, Potatoes, Green Beans, Peas, Bell Peppers, a variety of hot peppers, Kale, carrots and cabbage. We always have a bunch of different things, but sometimes we like to swap it up. On top of that, we have a bunch of different fruit! So there's always something out there that needs pickin'
